In Fashion | How Stella Got Her Sheep Back

The designer continues her eco-quest by sourcing wool from animals that lightly graze the Patagonian farmlands.

Photo

Credit Illustration by Konstantin Kakanias

Earlier this year, Stella McCartney partnered with the Nature Conservancy and Ovis 21, a network of over 160 farmers in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile that aims to undo the effects of more than 100 years of overgrazing due to reckless sheepherding. (Argentina is currently the world’s fifth-largest producer of wool.) McCartney sourced much of the wool for the knitwear in her fall collection from these farms, and she hopes to inspire others in the industry to follow suit. “By focusing on a raw material and not a specific fabric, this allows us maximum design flexibility,”she says. “I am proud to be expanding the boundaries of what sustainability can look and feel like.”

A version of this article appears in print on 05/11/2014, on page M236 of the NewYork edition with the headline: How Stella Got Her Sheep Back.